Chevrolet

"Louis Chevrolet was born in 1878 as the second of 8 children in French-speaking Switzerland. From Paris, where he worked in a car factory, he emigrated to Canada (Montreal) in 1900. The following year he took a job in New York City before starting to race cars for Fiat. In 1911 he founded the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in Detroit with William Durant (founder of General Motors)."

(Wikipedia)

It may be due to the seemingly limitless popularity of his duet partner Jelly Roll that Dustin Lynch's current single sits at number 7 of the radio (Billboard Country Airplay) chart and has thus become the 12th top-10 hit of his career. But it is probably more because 'Chevrolet' is incredibly catchy. And exudes a familiarity that is hard to grasp. As if the song, first released in December of 2023, was somehow a well-known one ...

But even if the text, about a girl who looks like she belongs to the big city but turns out to be a country girl after all sound, thematically familiar, this one written by Hunter Phelps, Jessi Alexander and Chase McGill is new:

Just give me a dirt road, with the windows down,
wanna get lost on the edge of town in your Chevrolet.
She said, "Give me a six-pack, some Brooks & Dunn.
If you want a country girl, you just found one, let's slip away,
Yeah, in your Chevrolet."

(Chevrolet / Hunter Phelps, Jessi Alexander, Chase McGill, Mentor Williams)

The solution to the riddle lies in the song's melody, which is by no means new at all. In fact, it dates back to 1970 and was written by country songwriter Mentor Williams, who passed away in 2016. The most famous line from that song was:

Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away.

Hence the original song title is 'Drift Away' and it was first released by British singer Mike Berry as the title song for his 1972 album.

However, the song's international success did not come until the following year (1973), when black soul singer Dobie Gray recorded it and reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts of that year. It became the biggest hit of a career that, after success in the pop and R&B charts, also brought the singer to the lower ranks of the country charts in the 1980s after having moved to Nashville in the late 1970s.

But 'Drift Away' also became a country hit in the same year that Dobie Gray had his hit with it (1973), when Narvel Felts' recording of it reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot Country Song chart. However, that version changed the line I wanna get lost in your rock and roll to the supposedly more acceptable I wanna get lost in your country song.

In the years that followed, countless other cover versions planted this catchy tune into the global collective subconsciousness. The Rolling Stones, Roy Orbison, Rod Stewart, Bon Jovi, Ike & Tina Turner, Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen among others, all released versions of the song. In 1992,  Michael Bolton had an international hit with it and in 2003, Uncle Kracker made the song a hit again in a duet version with Dobie Gray himself.

'Chevrolet' is not only a testament to the timelessness of the melody of 'Drift Away', it also creates the clever impression of being a completely new song. By using the technique of interpolation, however, Dustin Lynch only does what Kid Rock had already done so successfully with his worldwide hit 'All Summer Long': taking an existing melody and putting new lyrics over it.